Caught in the Revolution

by Helen Rappaport

  Two days later, Sir George Buchanan, who had only just recovered from illness, made the same trip to the palace with the ambassadors of France and Italy to pass on their official recognition of the Provisional Government. But unlike the enthusiastic Americans, they were dismayed to be received in ‘a room with a dirty floor and broken windows’. Maurice Paléologue was appalled by the changes to the palace: the great marble staircases had not been swept since the revolution, he noted, and there were bullet marks everywhere in the plasterwork. General Knox recorded a ‘general atmosphere of depression’ among the diplomats gathered there that afternoon, all of them fearful that the revolution would make it harder for the Allies to win the war.56 Sir George, having no Russian, made a brief speech in fluent French – the former language of diplomacy in imperial Russia – which was ‘very severe, but much to the point’, in which he ‘made an inspiriting appeal for the re-establishment of discipline in the army and the energetic prosecution of the war’.57 While Milyukov responded with a speech of thanks, Paléologue examined the members of the Provisional Government gathered around him: ‘Patriotism, intelligence and honesty could be read on every face; but they seemed utterly worn out with physical fatigue and anxiety. The task they have undertaken is patently beyond their powers. Heaven grant that they do not collapse under it too soon!’

  One person alone among them struck Paléologue as ‘a man of action’ – Alexander Kerensky. But he was an elusive figure who kept himself apart and, when seen, appeared waxen and sickly (he was suffering from TB of the kidneys). Paléologue had no doubt, however, that here was ‘the most original figure of the Provisional Government’. Kerensky was a man who seemed ‘bound to become its main spring’.58

  8

  The Field of Mars

  ALTHOUGH LIFE IN Petrograd appeared to be getting back to normal, its population had yet to count the true cost of the revolution – the dead. During the disturbances they had been carried off in haste in all directions and for days now their frozen (and in many cases unidentified) corpses had lingered as mute witnesses, stacked up like so many piles of wood in the city’s hospitals and makeshift mortuaries awaiting burial, while distraught relatives were still out searching for them.

  Wishing to cover such a powerful human-interest story, Florence Harper sought out the hospitals where the dead had been taken. She went first to the one nearest her hotel, a big city hospital on the Fontanka. Not knowing where to find the mortuary, she followed two weeping women across a courtyard ‘to a group of isolated buildings that were nothing but shacks’. From the cross on its door, she assumed this was the place. ‘There was a stream of people going into it’ and she followed. Inside, ‘as high as they could be piled, the chapel was full of coffins, some of them painted white and some of them unpainted pine’. She did not try to count them all: ‘It was too harrowing.’ But looking through the window of an adjoining shack she saw far worse: ‘right against the pane, on the other side, was something that made me jump back’. It was the body of a peasant fully clothed, ‘but his whole chest had been torn open’. His hands were raised ‘as if he were defending himself’ and his corpse was soaked in blood from the neck to the waist. His body had not been washed and was ‘lying there as he had been picked up, frozen’.1

  Luckily the cold had preserved the many un-coffined bodies she saw, but it had also left them in grotesque, contorted positions. Along three sides of the shack, Harper saw piles of rigid, muddy and blood-soaked bodies that had been thrown in ‘as they had been picked up’, some doubled up, others outstretched – men, women and children. Next to that shack was another, and then another with even more. In a big shed opposite she found another 150 bodies piled up. People were pulling at them, searching for loved ones, trying to identify them. ‘One in the uniform of the police was beyond recognition,’ she noted, ‘he had literally been beaten to a pulp.’ Very few of the corpses had any boots on – for these were a valuable commodity in wartime and were the first things to be stolen from the dead. With so many to be buried, coffins were scarce and so, once people identified their dead, they would pin a note on them, giving the name and asking for money to help bury them. People visiting these makeshift morgues would throw a few kopeks on the corpses. It was only later, visiting another hospital morgue where the bodies had been properly washed and laid out like wax figures, that Harper finally took in the grim horror of so many deaths.2

  A big public funeral for the victims of the revolution – or, rather, those among them whose bodies had not already been taken away and buried separately by relatives – was planned but postponed three times because, with no police force to marshal such a huge occasion, the Provisional Government and the Soviet feared it might spark anti-revolution demonstrations.3 They expected one million or more people to flood the streets, and that they might provoke a riot, given the ‘inflamed state of mind’ in which the crowds remained.4 Eventually a date was set for Thursday 23 March. Some had wanted the dead to be buried in front of the Winter Palace, but instead a site was chosen in the centre of the historic old parade ground known as the Field of Mars, bounded on one side by the massive-columned Pavlovsky Barracks, with the British embassy and the Marble Palace at the top end and the Summer Garden along the other side.5

  Such had been the intense cold that it had proved impossible to dig the trench required manually, and dynamite had to be used to create a sufficiently large grave in the transverse axis of the parade ground. Claude Anet visited the gravesite as it was being constructed.6 Opposite stood the trees of the Summer Garden, with their ‘black and lank branches’; overhead, a grey sky, full of clouds heavy with rain. In the middle was ‘a great yellow stain’ – the earth that had been removed for the graves. ‘Black and white flags, on the top of masts, were waving in the wind around the grave, some of them festooned with green garlands and flowers. Great red placards with inscriptions decorated the circumference of the reserved space.’ At its centre a platform draped in red cloth had been built as a vantage point for the members of the government and distinguished guests to watch the ceremony.7

  Shortly before the funeral took place there was a sudden spring thaw and the streets of Petrograd became a sea of mud and slush; by the preceding day part of the Nevsky was a ‘lake of water’. The 23rd, which had been declared a national holiday – ‘the first independence day of Russia’ – dawned, bleak and wretched.8 A damp, icy wind blew, with more snow threatened from the heavy lowering sky, as six separate, slow-moving processions set off from different parts of the city at around 10.00 a.m., eventually to converge at the burial site on the Field of Mars. But such were the huge crowds who had turned out to watch, and the ponderousness of the ceremonial, that the groups of marchers bearing the coffins sometimes had to stop for hours to let other processions move on.9 Traffic was at a standstill and the whole of the Nevsky was ‘jammed with spectators from one end to the other’, with a forest of flags and black-and-red banners reading, ‘Eternal Memory to Our Fallen Brothers’, ‘Heroes Who for Freedom Fell’, ‘Hail to the Democratic Republic’. Everyone marching in the funeral processions had been provided with a special ticket to do so and to admit them to the burial site on the Field of Mars. They were divided into rows eight deep, sixteen abreast, led by students carrying white sticks who raised and lowered them to indicate the need to halt or move forward. ‘It was exactly like the order and discipline of troops on the march, and trained soldiers could not have marched better,’ noted a French eyewitness.10 The sense of occasion was intense: a ‘soul-stirring emotion seemed to possess these long lines of mourners,’ wrote an English resident; the city that day seemed ‘transformed into a vast cathedral’.11

  Hugh Walpole noticed large numbers of peasants in the watching crowds: ‘They had stood there, I was told, in pools of frozen water for hours, and were perfectly ready to stand thus for many hours more if they were ordered to do so.’ Edward Heald estimated seeing ‘a hundred and fifty thousand people at one time on the Nevsky’ – and this was ‘p
robably no more than a fifth of the total number of marchers in sight at any one moment’. ‘There must have been half a million marchers in line,’ he estimated. ‘And what an impression it made; faces and forms that showed a lifetime of suffering and for whom a “Free Russia” had real meaning.’12

  American Frank Golder watched the pall-bearers, wearing red sashes across their shoulders and red armbands, processing down the Nevsky. The coffins of the dead were covered in red cloth and were followed by ‘a fairly well trained crowd of singers who sang the funeral service’. Behind them came ‘numerous organisations with banners and mottoes, some singing church music, others revolutionary and “svoboda” [freedom] songs’.13 Many bands accompanied the processions, alternating a long slow rendition of the Marseillaise – now unofficially adopted as a national anthem – with the wearisome monotony of Chopin’s Funeral March. Every once in a while, noticed Edward Heald, the mourners ‘would break out in church music or a prayer or chant and then the spectators would join in with bowed heads and doffed hats’. But although ‘Eternal Memory’, the Russian Orthodox prayer for the dead, was on the lips of many that day, no official church presence was allowed to conduct the ceremony. No priests, no incense, no crosses, no obsequies at the graveside and no icons, either – the only other accompaniment to this mournful spectacle were the cannons of the Peter and Paul fortress, which fired a salute for each coffin placed in the grave.14

  All day long and well into the night the processions continued to file along the main routes of the city, linking arms, ‘a mighty wave of humanity – old women, children, laborers, servants, soldiers, sailors, priests, people from every walk of life,’ recalled Leighton Rogers. ‘So constant was the movement and so solid the ranks that non-marchers found it impossible to cross the Nevsky.’15 Late that night the grave on the Field of Mars remained illuminated ‘under the glare of huge military searchlights whose rays, sweeping over the heads of the marchers, caught on the waving banners as they came into the field, their bearers singing a mournful dirge, quite oblivious of mud and slush, to plod on out of the light and disappear into the darkness’. It was, Rogers wrote, ‘something never to be forgotten’.16 Many of the foreign eyewitnesses concurred on the extraordinary calm and discipline with which the huge crowd had marked the occasion, and without the need for any police presence. One million had ‘marched and wept’ that day. ‘A community, once police-ridden, and still quivering with rage at incessant wrongs, kept the peace almost without sign of authority,’ observed Isaac Marcosson.17 ‘The threatened Commune became a Public Confessional of serene sorrow. Petrograd was safe as a Sunday School Convention.’

  The whole of the solemn, protracted ceremonial of 23 March had, in essence, been a symbolic gesture. Many of the victims had already been buried elsewhere by their relatives, and the coffins did not, of course, include the bodies of any of the numberless dead policemen; Meriel Buchanan heard that some of them even contained stones.fn1 Bertie Stopford noticed that during the ceremony ‘sometimes a simple plank of wood was carried alongside of the coffins to represent another victim who had already been buried’. He had counted around 150, but had heard there were 168 in all. Claude Anet was told that the authorities had prepared space for 160 coffins. Charles de Chambrun heard rumours that they had bolstered the number of dead for the procession by adding some Chinese who had died of influenza.18

  One thing is certain: no one who reported on or witnessed the February Revolution of 1917 came away with an accurate figure for the numbers killed and wounded.19 The official figures published in Pravda at the time, and perpetuated in traditional Soviet historiography, were 1,382 killed and woundedfn2. Many more estimates were circulated at the time, but they ranged wildly. Claude Anet was reliably informed by someone close to Prince Lvov that the ‘total of the victims of the Revolution . . . amounted to 7,000 for Petrograd – including all the wounded attended in hospitals and ambulances and the dead. To this must be added 1,000 wounded attended in private houses.’ He himself estimated around 1,500 dead.20 French resident Louise Patouillet heard talk of ‘7000 killed’; but many of the bodies buried that day had not been those of people who had ‘died for liberty’, for these victims had already been piously interred ‘without fuss’ in the city cemeteries, in preference to the ‘ostentatious obsequies’ of the Field of Mars.21

  Hugh Walpole reported to the British government a consensus that ‘the deaths in all amounted to about 4,000’. Arthur Reinke of Westinghouse wrote that the best estimate he had obtained ‘placed the number of killed at 3,000 to 5,000; the number of wounded ran into the ten thousands’. The ‘most conservative figure’ offered to Isaac Marcosson was five hundred dead civilians – but this was not counting the soldiers and policemen who had died. James Houghteling was told that ‘there were probably about 1,000 deaths’, but that ‘in a city of 2 million inhabitants a thousand single deaths were quite possible in such a revolution’. Florence Harper – who had, with Donald Thompson, been close to a lot of the violence at street level – reported that the lowest estimate of dead was two thousand; the highest ten thousand; Thompson placed the loss of life at ‘5,000 or a little more’.22 In general, the most commonly quoted number of dead was around four thousand, as British eyewitness James Pollock summarised: ‘The truth probably lies between four and five thousand killed. In the two days before the revolution broke out, some five hundred were killed in the centre of the city; during the three days of fighting many more, and this takes no account of the casualties beyond the river on the Petrograd and Viborg Sides.’ Of one thing Pollock had no doubt: ‘the agreeable statements made as to the bloodlessness are much exaggerated’.23

  For the dead of the February Revolution there would be only a collective, secular memorial. ‘Since the archaic age of Saint Olga and Saint Vladimir, and indeed since the Russian people first appeared in the light of history, it is the first time that a great national act has been performed without the help of the church,’ Ambassador Paléologue wrote in his diary.24 He was forcibly struck by the contrast: ‘Only a few days ago, all the thousands of soldiers and workmen whom I saw marching past me could not see the smallest ikon in the street without stopping, lifting their caps and crossing themselves fervently.’

  It was gone 10.00 p.m. when the last of the parade laid down their coffins that day. With darkness having descended over the vast open grave, the crowds finally began dispersing into the freezing night. The following day workmen began filling the grave with concrete. The Field of Mars took on a ‘desolate and sinister’ aspect, as Maurice Paléologue pondered the ramifications of this momentous day in Russian history:

  As I returned to the Embassy by the solitary paths of the Summer Garden, I reflected that I had perhaps witnessed one of the most considerable events in modern history. For what has been buried in the red coffins is the Byzantine and Muscovite tradition of the Russian people, nay the whole past of orthodox Holy Russia.25

  What he had witnessed was, in effect, the first major public act of what would become a new, official atheism.26fn3 Thursday 23 March 1917 was an enormous religious and cultural watershed, from which Russia would not look back for seventy-three years.

  9

  Bolsheviki! It Sounds ‘Like All that the World Fears’

  ‘I SAY! THERE’S an amazing fellow over there on the other side of the Troitsky Bridge,’ an excited English resident told Negley Farson one day in early April:

  ‘He’s talking rank anarchy! Immediate peace, no annexations, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, world revolution! Never heard anything like it in my life! . . . Advocates the soldiers coming back from the front and the overthrow of the Provisional Government . . . now! ‘Doesn’t he know there’s a war on?’1

  In the weeks following the announcement of a political amnesty on 6 March, thousands of Russian émigrés had begun returning to Petrograd after long years of exile – some from Europe, others from Siberia. In a few cases the government funded their return; others made their way back thanks
to popular subscriptions raised to help them. Those from Siberia were arriving daily into the Nicholas Station, from which many of them had initially been transported. On 15 March alone, J. Butler Wright noted that five trainloads had arrived there.2 But on 3 April (the Russian Orthodox Easter Monday) attention was focused elsewhere – on the Finland Station – where the most important figure in the revolutionary movement in exile was about to make his long-anticipated return.

  Rumours had been circulating for days about the return to Petrograd of a leading ‘socialist fanatic’; Isaac Marcosson had found excited crowds in the streets near the station and, when he asked what it was all about, he was told: ‘Lenin is coming today.’3 Few among the Russian population at large knew Lenin’s name or exactly what he represented, but there was no doubt about the inflammatory message this revolutionary leader brought with him, after sixteen long, hard years of exile in Europe.

  His real name was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, the ‘Lenin’ sobriquet being the last of a string of pseudonyms and aliases that he had adopted during his years of political propagandising from a succession of boltholes across Europe. As a Marxist theorist and head of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party (RSDLP), Lenin had been sowing the seeds of discontent from a distance, via a network of underground activists across Russia, who illegally circulated his seditious political pamphlets, including the now-notorious ‘What Is to Be Done?’ and his underground newspaper Iskra (The Spark), both of which called for a people’s revolution led by a dedicated intellectual elite.4